C
RITIC: Your justifications for majority rule all depend on certain assumptions. I confess that if I could fully accept those assumptions your arguments would compel me to conclude that majority rule is rationally justified and that no alternative to it is as good. In short, I would have to say that the democratic process necessarily entails the principle of majority rule.
But, as I've indicated in the course of our discussion, I believe many of your key assumptions are open to serious objections.
M
AJORITARIAN: Which ones do you have in mind?
C
RITIC: Though I agreed with you that some simplifying assumptions might be useful, you'll agree with me, I'm sure, that the complications created by the real world of democratic life do have to be taken into account.
M
AJORITARIAN: Of course. If I thought that the majority principle could not be justified in actual political life, I'd reject it.
More Than Two Alternatives
C
RITIC: Well, your assumption that the demos confronts only two alternatives is obviously highly unrealistic. Yet whenever citizens must vote on three or more alternatives the principle of majority rule runs into serious difficulties. For one thing, the principle is no longer always decisive. 8
With only two alternatives, what majority rule requires is perfectly clear: The alternative supported by the larger number of voters should be adopted. But let's suppose that voters face three alternatives, A. B, and C. Let's suppose further that each voter ranks the alternatives in the order of their desirability. We can now interpret the majority principle in several different ways, depending on how the various voters rank the alternatives.
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The easiest case exists if one alternative is ranked first by an absolute majority of voters. Then under the majority principle that alternative ought of course to be adopted. Here's a clearcut instance:
Group
I II III
Ranking of alternatives A C B
B B C
C A A
Votes: 55 25 20
A is ranked first by 55 voters, an absolute majority. Alternative A is therefore adopted—a pretty unambiguous interpretation of majority rule.
But what are we to say if none of the alternatives is ranked first by an absolute majority? For example, suppose that Group I consists of 40 voters, Group II of 35, and Group III of 25:
Group
I II III
Ranking of alternatives A C B
B B C
C A A
Votes: 40 35 25
M
AJORITARIAN: One possible solution in that case would be to employ Condorcet's criterion in order to define a ''majority." The winning outcome would be the alternative that defeats each of the others in a vote on every pair of alternatives. In your example that would mean pitting A against B, B against C, and C against A.
Applying this decisionrule to your example, B would beat C by 65–35 (Groups I and III against Group II); and B would also beat A by 60–40 (Groups II and III against Group I). In the third pairwise vote, C would beat A by 60–40. So B would beat A and C, and C would beat A. By the Condorcet criterion B is the clear winner.
Cyclic Majorities
C
RITIC: Condorcet pulled you out of that hole, but I don't think he can get you out of a far deeper one. In some circumstances the rankings of the voters might not allow a demos to employ the Condorcet criterion, much less to insist on an absolute majority. Let me show you an example:
Group
I II III
Ranking of alternatives A C B
B A C
C B A
Votes: 40 30 30
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Page 146 In this case, A will defeat B, 70–30 (Groups I and II against Group III); B will defeat C, 70–30 (Groups I and III against Group II); and C will defeat A, 60–40 (Groups II and III against Group I). We now confront an instance of cyclic majorities, which your mentor Condorcet also discussed. As you know, this intractable problem in democratic theory and practice has received an extraordinary amount of attention since Kenneth Arrow directed attention to it in 1951. Arrow's famous Impossibility Theorem demonstrates that unless you allow one person to dictate to all the rest, no solution to a cyclic majority exists that doesn't violate at least one of several other reasonable assumptions. 9 To my knowledge, no one has ever succeeded in showing that any of Arrow's assumptions are unreasonable or discovered a solution to cyclic majorities consistent with those assumptions. So, unless you're prepared to replace majority rule with dictatorship, you can't provide any way out of a majority cycle that isn't arbitrary.
M
AJORITARIAN: Well, one possible solution would be to interpret the majority principle as requiring the adoption of the alternative preferred by the largest number of voters—what Americans call a "plurality" and the British a "relative majority." If a plurality or relative majority were acceptable, then in your last example A would be adopted, since it's ranked first by the largest number of voters.
C
RITIC: But as my example shows, and as we all know from common experience, a plurality of voters can be a minority of voters. To insist in this case that the majority principle requires a minority to have its way seems to me selfcontradictory. How can majority rule be rationally justified if no majority exists?
Controlling the Agenda
C
RITIC: Cyclic voting creates still another problem for the democratic process: Control over the agenda can be used to manipulate the outcome. As you can see from my last example, the sequence in which people vote on the alternatives could arbitrarily ensure a winner. Suppose that a clever advocate of one of the alternatives controls the agenda, perhaps as moderator or chairman of the meeting. Let's say the chairman wants A to win. She first asks the citizens to vote between B and C. B wins 70–30. Then she asks them to vote between B and the remaining alternative, A. This time A beats B 70–30. She then pronounces A the winner. A chairman who could manipulate the agenda this way could just as well have brought about a victory for either of the other two alternatives. Doesn't that nullify the criterion of final control?
M
AJORITARIAN: No, because the criterion requires that the citizens have an opportunity to determine how the agenda is to be determined. They might decide, for example, that when voting cycles occur a plurality of votes will suffice or the matter is to be decided by a lottery of some sort or by any other method that seems to them fair and reasonable.
Boundary Problems
C
RITIC: Let me now turn to the two boundary problems I mentioned earlier. One, you may recall, has to do with the boundary between matters decided collec
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tively and matters not so decided: the boundary for collective decisions. The other has to do with the boundaries of the collective unit itself. Considering the boundary for collective decisions in the light of your first justification, might it not sometimes be possible to maximize selfdetermination by allowing individuals or groups to decide certain matters autonomously rather than submitting them to a collective decision?
M
AJORITARIAN: Of course! But deciding how a particular matter is to be decided, whether collectively or autonomously, will itself require a collective decision, will it not, at least if and when the question becomes a public issue? Unless you want to contend that no matters whatsover will require collective decisions, the assumption we agreed to is perfectly valid. And if nothing requires collective decisions we surely don't need a democratic process, do we?
C
RITIC: I accept your point. But I don't want us to forget that for a democratic association to maximize selfdetermination among its members requires far more than their adoption of a satisfactory principle for collective decisions.
M
AJORITARIAN: I fully agree. I'm now wondering whether the question of the unit's boundaries won't also prove to be a problem not in the majority principle but rather in democratic theory and practice more generally.
C
RITIC: To find out, let's examine the problem. Like the democratic process itself, the majority principle assumes the existence of a political unit, within which a body of citizens must arrive at collective decisions. But nothing in the idea of majority rule provides a rational justification for the boundaries around any specific unit. To say that a decision should be made by majority rule simply does not—and cannot—answer the question: a majority of what democratic unit?
M
AJORITARIAN: True. But I don't see how the point bears on the justification for majority rule.
C
RITIC: Let's suppose a country exists that governs itself by the democratic process, adopts the majority principle for its collective decisions, and yet contains a permanent majority and a permanent minority. So the same people always win and the same people always lose. Let's say the permanent majority are 60 percent, leaving a permanent minority of 40 percent. So 60 percent of the citizens live under laws they've chosen, while 40 percent always live under laws they don't like, laws imposed on them by the majority. I would hardly call that a way of maximizing selfdetermination. What you have instead is selfdetermination for the majority and external determination for the minority: majority domination, I'd say. Wouldn't selfdetermination be maximized instead if the two groups were to separate into two independent political associations? Since the people in each would now agree among themselves on the laws they wanted, everybody would live under laws they'd chosen for themselves, while none would be obliged to obey laws imposed on them by others.
M
AJORITARIAN: Your solution is obviously the correct one, at least formally. So let's assume that instead of one association we now have two. But please notice an interesting consequence of the change: The citizens in each association now confront exactly the same question as they did before! What decision rule do you believe they should now adopt for governing themselves in their new and more
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Page 148 homogeneous units? Naturally if you want to postulate a fairy tale conclusion, in which perfect harmony exists in each unit forever after, then you won't need an answer.
But politics, the state, and the need for a democratic process would also vanish in a wisp of smoke. You've implied that the assumptions I've been suggesting might not apply to the real world. Well, the "harmony forevermore" scenario is to the real world as the tooth fairy is to a toothache. All I'm arguing is that in any democratic unit that lacks perfect unanimity, in other words, in any real democratic unit, selfdetermination would be maximized by majority rule in collective decisions.
C
RITIC: And what I'm arguing is simply this: No matter how democratic their convictions, a minority might reject majority rule in a particular political unit. Instead, they might insist on altering the unit itself, maybe by decentralizing decisions on certain matters to more homogeneous units, possibly even by gaining complete independence. In fact I would generalize the argument: Assuming that the democratic process is desirable among any given collection of people, the values of the democratic process might sometimes be better achieved by changing the boundaries of the unit.
M
AJORITARIAN: I've already conceded your point. If one way of bounding a political unit would serve democratic values better than another, then other things being equal the better unit obviously ought to be selected. In the real world, though, other things aren't equal and boundary questions aren't easily solved. But can't we distinguish the question of majority rule from the question of the unit's boundaries? What constitutes the best unit within which to achieve democratic values is itself so difficult and complex a question that to do it justice would require an extended discussion ranging far beyond the majority principle. 10 However, I must insist on this point: My argument is that, once a particular unit is taken as given, even if only tentatively, then among the members of that unit the majority principle provides on balance a better democratic decision rule than any alternative to it.
The Attenuation of Majority Rule in the Real World
C
RITIC: Let me turn to another assumption. I don't believe that a reasonable justification can be made for majority rule without explicitly taking representation into account. I'm quite willing to admit that, in order to simplify the discussion at the outset, it was helpful to ignore the complexities that representation entails. But majority rule would have only limited relevance to the modern world if it couldn't be justified for representative systems.
M
AJORITARIAN: I can hardly deny what you say. In order to present a more straightforward argument, it is useful to consider democratic associations in which citizens would assemble and vote directly on the laws. But I readily concede that in today's world direct democracy is the exception. Consequently if the majority principle is to be relevant to modern democracy we have to be able to apply it to representative democracy. But I don't see why that should create insuperable difficulties.
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C
RITIC: Yet wasn't Rousseau dead right about representation? Doesn't representation seriously attenuate majority rule?
M
AJORITARIAN: What do you mean, "attenuate"?
C
RITIC: I mean that conditions in the real world generally weaken the translation of majority preferences into law and administration. When you speak of majority rule in the real world, what majority do you have in mind—a majority of citizens, a majority of voters, or a majority of legislators? Even in systems of direct democracy, majority rule is attenuated if many citizens abstain from participating. For example, in the New England town meetings that I'm familiar with, only a small minority of citizens attend the meetings, and they aren't particularly "representative" of the others. As to Athenian democracy, no one can say with confidence what percentage of citizens came to the assemblies or how representative they were. Some advocates of direct democracy argue that in large systems referenda can substitute for assemblies; but referenda are notorious as instruments of minorities. When we turn to modern representative systems, we notice that in some, such as the United States, the turnout in midterm congressional elections is under 50 percent. Even where electoral turnout is relatively high, a majority of the voters may slim down into a minority of legislators. What's more, a minority of voters may sometimes win a majority of seats.
M
AJORITARIAN: I'm aware of that. But electoral systems can be designed to ensure that electoral majorities end up as legislative majorities. Fortunately, a democratic country doesn't have to adopt the highly defective type of electoral system employed in Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In those countries, the electoral systems make it possible, and not uncommon, for representatives of a minority of voters to win a majority of seats. But it's just because of these defects in the electoral systems of the Englishspeaking countries that almost all other democratic countries have instead adopted systems of proportional
representation, which generally produce a pretty close fit between electoral and legislative majorities.
C
RITIC: But even under PR, in a country with three or more significant parties in parliament, as is almost invariably the case, the process of forming a cabinet supported by a majority of members is by no means completely determined by the preceding election. In fact, governing coalitions may fall apart between elections and new ones, different from the old, may take their place without a new election. I'd say that's rather a sizable attenuation of majority rule.
M
AJORITARIAN: I agree. But isn't the majority principle an important criterion against which we can judge the legitimacy of the government that is eventually formed?
C
RITIC: No doubt it's one criterion. But when we apply it we see how frequently actual practice in real world democratic countries falls short of the abstract principle.
And the majority principle is attenuated in practice not only by representation; it's further attenuated by all the other factors that impede political equality and consensus in the real world.
M
AJORITARIAN: It seems to me you're only saying what we already know
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Page 150 perfectly well: To achieve anything close to the democratic process in the real world is difficult and in some times, places, and conditions virtually impossible. But to the extent that we can achieve it, then the majority principle, even if attenuated in practice, is the best decision rule.
C
RITIC: Only up to a point. I'm suggesting that, even if we believe that the majority principle is the best decision rule for an ideal democracy, the more that majority rule is attenuated in practice the weaker its justification also becomes in practice. Under some conditions, majority rule might be so attenuated that we could reasonably prefer an alternative.
M
AJORITARIAN: What do you have in mind?
C
RITIC: Nothing specific. But I would suggest that from a realistic perspective perhaps more often than not governmental decisions in democratic countries are not instances of majority rule at all but of minorities rule.
M
AJORITARIAN: Are you now asserting that actual democracies are really systems of minority domination, as writers like Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels, V. I. Lenin, and many other critics of "bourgeois" democracy have contended? If so, you surprise me. I know we disagree somewhat about the majority principle, but until now I hadn't supposed that in your view a reasonable approximation to democracy is impossible to achieve in the real world!
C
RITIC: Hold on! No, in my view theories of minority domination, like those of the people you just mentioned, profoundly misrepresent the nature of government in modern democratic countries. 11 I mean something rather different. I mean that if you carefully examine specific decisions of governments, often they can't be correctly described as majority decisions. They're more accurately described as decisions by a minority or a minority coalition of minorities. In theories of minority domination the dominant minority is roughly the same in all key decisions. In systems of "minorities rule" the minority or minority coalition varies significantly in composition and interests from one decision or type of decision to another.
M
AJORITARIAN: Maybe "minorities rule" is a correct empirical description of decisionmaking in some democratic countries. But once again, wouldn't we judge a system of "minorities rule" to be inferior to a system of majority rule? What you call minorities rule is definitely a secondbest system, isn't it?
C
RITIC: Not necessarily. It might allow more people to achieve more of the policies they most strongly prefer than they would under a more majoritarian system. To that extent, it might maximize selfdetermination, average utility, and fairness more than would be possible under strict majority rule.
M
AJORITARIAN: Or it might not. That would depend on empirical circumstances, right?
C
RITIC: Exactly. But if "minorities rule" is better than majority rule in some circumstances, then we can't say that the principle of majority rule is always the best, can we?
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Dalam dokumen
Robert A. Dahl - Democracy and Its Critics-Yale University Press (1989)
(Halaman 143-152)